A Flawed Icon Seen By A True Friend

October 29, 1991|By Reviewed by John McDonough, a writer and critic.

Traps the Drum Wonder:

The Life of Buddy Rich

By Mel Torme

Oxford University Press, 256 pages, $21.95

Singer Mel Torme had been both fan and friend of Buddy Rich, the great jazz drummer, for nearly 50 years by the time Rich died in 1987, and that tension shows in page after page of Torme`s account of his life, ``Traps the Drum Wonder.`` Torme the fan was so full of starstruck wonder for Rich`s talent that he was willing to put up with a catalog of bizarre behavior and often unmitigated rudenesses that any other pal would have walked away from early on. Out of a combination perhaps of affection for and curiosity about this vexing man, Torme hung in.

Great icons can be great embarrassments, like the fiance one brings home in the hopes he will make a good impression on the folks but who ends up contemptuously tracking tar across the living room carpet and running over the family pooch on the way out of the driveway. How do you explain such people, make excuses for them, justify your affection for them to others who think you`re nuts?

That`s rather the position Torme puts himself in here. His book begins as a good, though not exceptional, show business biography. Then in the mid-1960s it evolves into a most interesting memoir of a difficult personal relationship, a kind of latter day ``Of Human Bondage`` in which Torme plays Philip to Rich`s manipulative Mildred. Rich writes of his erratic but extraordinary friend with impatience, frustration, bewilderment and, ultimately, deeply felt compassion.

He traces the fast rise of the toddling drum prodigy in vaudeville, then his decline during adolescence. Through reviews and anecodotes, Torme conveys the sense that the infant who pounded his high chair with knives and forks was something truly amazing. Here, for example is Variety on Rich at 5: ``(He)

alternately grinned and chewed gum while he tapped the drums . . . with the ability of a veteran jazz drummer.`` Another review cited ``a malicious enthusiasm beneath his air of contempt.``

By the early `30s, however, the child wonder was no longer a child, no longer a novelty. He seemed to have no future. Then the swing era intervened. In 1937, when he was 19, he surfaced again on New York`s 52nd Street, playing in a Dixieland group. Musicians quickly recognized his talent, and within 14 months he became the key figure in the explosive Artie Shaw band of 1939.

Torme charts Rich`s career in the big time through the years with Tommy Dorsey; his romance with Lana Turner; his friendship and falling out with Frank Sinatra (who had Rich beaten up at one point); and the postwar years with his own bands, Jazz at the Philharmonic, Harry James and Dorsey.

The author tells his story effectively up to this point, but from a distance. Rich comes to us filtered through the sieve of press clippings and other public sources. We know about him without really getting to know him. Then the keen eye of the first-class journalist and memoirist in Torme takes over.

In 1966 Rich ended his sideman days forever, organized the first of the bands that would keep going until the end, and became a national celebrity with his cocksure comebacks to Johnny Carson on ``The Tonight Show.`` Rich and Torme drew closer during these years, and that closeness comes through vividly. His account of Rich`s swift decline is immediate and moving. Buddy Rich was fortunate indeed to have had such a friend and biographer as Torme.